What happens when you cross soccer with geography?

Monthly Archives: May 2014

An excellent and insightful reflection on sexism, sport and (sigh) academia. I would have liked to have attended this conference except for the inconvenience of already being at the AAG in Tampa at the same time. I like to think I would have been arguing for the women’s game, but it makes me think about my own writing and how I incorporate my own postionality in the game.

“People want excellence in sports, and the quality of women’s soccer is not there.”

“Nobody wants to watch women’s sports.”

“The top women can’t take on the top men.”

These three things were said by attendees at a recent congress of leading scholars and journalists working on soccer.

The organizers of Soccer as the Beautiful Gamedeserve a lot of credit for bringing scholars and sports writers together. What follows is not a criticism of that conference, or of its organizers – quite the opposite. At this moment, it is not possible to organize a conference at which the above statements would not be made, unless one either excluded women and women’s football from all discussion, or invited only feminists to the table. The conference’s organizers worked to make sure that feminist scholars like myself were in the room because they are committed to changing the field.

As long as people writing about the men’s game write only about men, they can maintain…